The second cartoon shows Santa Claus holding his leg, obviously in pain, after a kid kicked him in the shin. The caption from the kid reads, “That’s for last year!”

Then there is the third comic. On one side of the cartoon, Santa is sitting in his chair holding a little guy who points to the toy section of the store. The caption reads: “We could save ourselves a lot of time and energy if you’ll just follow me over to that toy store and get me the stuff I want right now.”

We want too much of the wrong thing and not enough of the right thing. We get angry when we don’t get what we want or think we deserve. And we are prone to take shortcuts and thus get what we want. All of this is representative of the wrong thing.  We’ve simply not come to realize that the wrong thing will not last forever. The right thing does.

This is why, “when the time was right, God sent his Son, and a woman gave birth to him” (Gal. 4:4). In Gal. 4, Paul seized the moment with an early confession of faith drawn from the worship and proclamation, including baptism, in the Christian congregations of the mid first century AD. When the time was exactly right, a child was born. A son was given. And He was given the name Everlasting Father.

Did you hear the “father” language throughout this text? Emphatically Paul asserts, “…that God is our Father” (v.6b). Did you grasp the fact that in Jesus Christ we are children of a God who is a Father, a Father who is a God? A literal God-Father as well as a Father-God. He is Everlasting. This is so paradoxical. In the Manger is a Baby who is a Father. Unbelievable! And this Father is “everlasting to everlasting,” to borrow language from the Psalms.

What Do You Need This Christmas?

Through this Child we are granted what we need. And what we really need is life as it comes to us from a Father who lasts forever.  So the question I posed at the outset, “Can a father last forever?” is thus answered in the affirmative. Yes, at least one Father can. All of our toys, gadgets, clothes, all the things of this earthly life, let’s face it: they aren’t going to last forever. But a relationship with Bethlehem’s Child does. This Child introduces us to an Eternal Father who always provides what we need, not what want, but what we need.

In fact, our relationship with this Everlasting Father is such that we, His adopted children, can come into His presence just as if we weren’t adopted at all. So I really am a son of God. Jackie really is a daughter of God. All of us, who are in Christ, are children of God. We aren’t orphaned! He really is our Daddy. He really does embody what parenthood concerns. He is the kind of parent that wants us to come to Him with our grief, our trouble, our anxiety and our hopelessness as we confront the reality of things not lasting forever.